Thoughting #2: The blind faith of intellect

I have this “disease” of seeing nearly all of the thinking, opining, proclaiming – the beliefs, philosophizing, intellectualizing that people do and have as airy nonsense, as delusional, neurotic garbage – falsities. Every time I hear some highbrow such as Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson or even the estimable Christopher Hitchens wag his tongue and nod his neocortex, I think: “You don’t know why you think that. You ‘commit your consciousness’* to some puffy concept and you don’t really know why you subscribe to it.” What I’m saying is that these intellectuals only – at most – plumb the depths of their thinking, which can only leave them in a circular system high above the reasons or causes – the seed, the actual identity – of the thinking. A fourteen-year-old boy in therapy crosses his arms, with a face of grim disgust, and remarks: “Life is crap. People are garbage.” If he were a forty-year-old professor with a distinguished manner, he might phrase his similar attitude this way: “There is no intrinsic meaning to life. Human nature is more a wayward anchor than a soaring eagle. Yet we should stand up straight with our shoulders back.”** – and we’d think we were hearing considerable ideas, wisdom carrying wide and deep and not diminished by the fact that other Wise Ones would have opposing views.

But no. We’d still be hearing the sounds of pain of a fourteen-year-old, which were the neglect, confusion and defeat of the four-year-old, filtered by repression and squeezed through the tunnel of a developing brain.

Almost all subjective thinking, no matter how substantial and inspiring it may seem, is a masquerade over hidden, personal truths of feeling. Does a White Supremacist know why he hates millions of people he will never encounter? No. Does Sam Harris know why he argues so articulately that a “motherlode of bad ideas” – his description of Islam – can cause people to act poorly, when it is generally obvious that thinking does not directly cause action? No. Does Alan Dershowitz know why he prefers the quiddities of the law and rights to the bleeding heart of the matter, in his supports of Donald Trump? No, he doesn’t. Does one astrophysicist know why he sees the Big Bang as evidence of a supreme being? Another, evidence of a godless “something from nothing”? No: They don’t look to the inner feeling, the intrapsychic molecular felt state that makes one or the other position necessary to them, necessary to their identity, their sense of self.

To me, this masquerade is of ultimate importance because it has made us a false world – no less. We are not in touch with our pain, our roots, or even the core of our happiness. The masquerade is a lonely place to be. It enables crimes, because the injury motivating them can never be reached. It produces billions and billions of words that turn into smoke, and certainties that disappear the next week. The words and certainties, in fact, must be wrong: There are no truths but “I hurt, I love, I need.” Everything else is a deceiver.

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* Borrowed from N. Branden’s definition of faith: “Faith is the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof.”

** One of Peterson’s Olympian morsels.